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The
congressional panel authorized and funded to investigate the performance
of intelligence agencies leading to the Sept. 11 attacks has been racked
with internal strife, partisan politics and disagreements
over its ultimate goal.

The
panel, composed of members of the House and Senate intelligence committees,
has hired 23 staff members and obtained 150,000 pages of CIA documents.
But it has not agreed whether its central mission is to figure out if
federal agencies failed to do their job, or the less politically-charged
question of how the nation's intelligence system should be reorganized.

The
panel has delayed its opening hearing date three times and
forced out its original director. The replacement is expected
to be someone who has no background in the specialized world of intelligence
matters. The problems have been aggravated by what some staff members
see as roadblocks being thrown up by the CIA
and delays in resolving differences over access to FBI and Justice Department
documents.

The
panel's troubles come amid a swirling controversy over the Bush administration's
handling of intelligence information before Sept. 11 and questions about
whether the CIA, FBI and other agencies misread warning signs about
a possible attack against the United States.

As
the lone body in Congress authorized to study the intelligence community's
performance, and with a $2.6 million budget, the committee could provide
valuable insight, according to its co-chairmen, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.)
and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.).

The
review will provide an "opportunity not only to study the tragedy
in more detail, but to determine whether previous concerns regarding
the intelligence community's capabilities are viable," Goss said
in February when the panel was formed.

But
some members, charging that the committee has already been unduly politicized,
have called for a separate, independent commission to replace the panel
even before the two chairmen call it to order for the first time.

"We
need an independent commission because we do not need to engage in a
political witch hunt to blame the Clinton administration or the Bush
administration for failure," said Rep. Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.).
"We need to involve professional experts and people with technical
skills who not only know the right questions to ask but what to do with
the answers to transform the intelligence agencies from Cold War agencies
into agencies targeting terrorists and transnational threats."

Vice
President Cheney said yesterday that creating another commission could
create "a circus atmosphere." He backed the work of the special
intelligence committee panel. "They've got the expertise, they've
got the staffs, they've got the procedures for dealing with classified
information," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"They know what they're doing in this area, and we're comfortable
working with them."

Even
without the political and organizational differences, the committee's
job would be daunting, given the mass of information it must sift through
and the reluctance of secretive, competing intelligence agencies to
fully cooperate.

Many
of the panel's 23 staffers have moved into offices at the CIA, National
Security Agency and National Imagery and Mapping Agency. At the CIA,
they have conducted 45 interviews, many with senior staff, but have
sifted through only about 75 percent of the 150,000 pages of documents
turned over to the panel.

At
the same time, the CIA has created what staff members consider to be
obstacles. Interviews with CIA officers must be conducted in a room
adjacent to the agency's congressional liaison office, a lack of anonymity
that staffers believe will intimidate some employees. The CIA has also
forbidden its employees from exchanging business cards with the committee
staff and has declined to turn over documents that originated in other
departments, invoking what is called the "third agency" rule
under which the agency that originated the information must give its
approval before it can be released.

CIA
spokesman Bill Harlow said the agency is being "extremely cooperative"
and has given the panel "virtually everything they've asked for."

Harlow
said the agency has dedicated 15 employees to helping the panel staff.
To assist the committee, the agency has built a timeline of counterterrorism
incidents from 1993 to 2000, which, laid out on the floor, is 327 feet
long with 2,600 entries. Each entry has hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of documents connected to it.

Graham
said Friday that he and Goss expect to announce this week a tentative
hearing schedule that will last from late June into the fall.

The
committee staff, which has been divided into four teams, has been at
work over the past six weeks gathering materials, reviewing documents
and identifying and interviewing witnesses. The CIA, FBI and National
Security Agency, which intercepts electronic intelligence, each have
separate teams, with the fourth group covering the other agencies.

A
meeting is set for this week between Graham, Goss, Attorney General
John D. Ashcroft and two ranking committee members, Sen. Richard C.
Shelby (R-Ala.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), to work out issues
over obtaining FBI and Justice Department materials involving current
prosecutions and investigations.

"These
have been the toughest issues so far," Graham said. Another meeting
is being arranged with CIA Director George J. Tenet, he said, although
the problems there "are not much."

Sen.
Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the gathering of information from Justice has
been "difficult where cases are going to trial," but otherwise
"almost everyone agrees there has been good cooperation."

The
committee has confronted several problems of its own making. Its senior
members initially could not decide whether its review should be called
an investigation for fear of sounding too critical of the Bush administration
and the war on terrorism.

Then
last month, as the committee was preparing to set its hearing schedule,
an internal flap over a person's security clearance led to the resignation
of L. Britt Snider, the committee's staff director. Snider's departure
not only pushed back the inquiry but also exposed internal tensions
over the original appointment of Snider, who was Tenet's inspector general
at the CIA and a longtime associate of the director going back to their
days together on the staff of the Senate intelligence panel.

Snider's
replacement is expected to be former Defense Department inspector general
Eleanor Hill, committee sources said.

There
also has been a running disagreement among several members as to the
purpose of the inquiry. Graham and Goss have said the object is not
to place blame but rather to determine what changes should be made to
make sure an attack like Sept. 11 does not happen again.

The
inquiry would not play "the blame game about what went wrong from
an intelligence perspective," Graham said in February, but would
build for the future by identifying "any shortcomings in our intelligence
community and fix[ing] these problems as soon as possible."

Shelby,
on the other hand, wants to see whether actual failures took place for
which individuals should be held responsible. Shelby has been calling
for Tenet's resignation going back to the 1999 investigation of former
CIA director John M. Deutch for mishandling classified information.
He has repeated his concerns about Tenet in the wake of the Sept. 11
attacks.

Another
disagreement has been over how long the inquiry should take. Under the
original plan, Graham and Goss believed that hearings over the summer
would lead to introduction and perhaps even passage of remedial legislation
by the end of the year.

Although
the resignation of Snider and delay in finding a replacement set the
schedule back, they still hope to finish this year because both chairmen
will rotate off the committee at the end of this Congress, having served
their prescribed terms.

Shelby,
on the other hand, who also will be ending his intelligence panel service
this year, has made clear he would like the investigation to continue
on into the next Congress.

Among
the more difficult, yet crucial, issues the panel will consider is the
coordination or lack of coordination among counterterrorism offices
at competing agencies.

The
CIA's counterterrorism center, how it operates and how it meshed with
similar centers run by the FBI and more recently the Pentagon, was a
focus of the joint inquiry from the beginning. When the center opened
at CIA headquarters, its role was to function on behalf of all intelligence
agencies, a central role that has slowly been dissipated as the other
centers grew.

The
center grew from about 300 CIA case officers and analysts, plus representatives
from the FBI, the Pentagon and other agencies such as the Federal Aviation
Administration and Immigration and Naturalization Service, to about
1,200 people today. Directing it was "a killer job" for Cofer
Black, who left the post this week.

Intelligence
sources said Black was not forced out, but his departure is likely to
be one avenue of inquiry for the panel.

(In
accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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